Updates to our Terms of Service

When we originally wrote our terms of service, we wanted to make sure that gitorious.org could not get in trouble if our users published source code they were not allowed to publish; for instance if they didn’t have a license for the source code. Based on this, our terms of service stated that users submitting content to gitorious.org granted Gitorious “a world-wide, perpetual, royalty-free, and non-exclusive license(…)” to the content.

As someone pointed out on the Gitorious mailing list, most free software licenses prohibit sublicensing, which made our terms of service incompatible with these licenses. We have been working with our attourney and the Free Software Foundation over the past two months to come up with a terms of service that both limits Gitorious’ liabilities in case of copyright infringement and is compatible with free software licenses.

We have just posted an updated version of the Terms of Service that the FSF finds acceptable, and still protects Gitorious sufficiently. We believe the changes we have made are to our users’ benefit, but as a gitorious.org user you should review these changes.

If you have any comments or questions about these changes, please comment on this post.